Lost Girl (23 page)

Back in the room, hindsight assured him his flight had been marked by nothing more tangible than paranoia and the after-effects of traumas, the shock of ending lives with a handgun, from scaring
a beautiful woman witless. All before seeing the collected
artworks
of Yonah Abergil in his office, as if that private viewing had been the apex of a terrible momentum, the final layer in
a ritual he’d unwittingly attended.

The horrors of his actions travelled back through his limbs like vibrations. He felt again the ghostly imprint of Yonah’s soft face against the top of one foot, heard the crack and crump,
the glassy tinkle, after bringing down the whisky bottle against the back of the man’s skull; tactile spectral imprints of the violence he’d inflicted.

Again, in his thoughts, the nurse’s tunic punctured and filled red.

An old man called for Marie in the deepest fissures of his ears.

Ochre smears upon white marble
.

The moist temple of Abergil’s head, the quiver of the pulse
.

And the bones he had seen upon the walls danced again in the father’s mind. He covered his eyes as if that could shut such visions out. But once seen, the most terrible things remain
inside forever. He knew that better than anyone.

Behind the polished glass protecting an alcove in the wall of Yonah’s office, red candles had burned before a mess of photographs in a crude shrine: they depicted shots of waste ground,
concrete walls, stained tarmac, darkened timbers and cement, even the sea’s surface. The case had been stuffed with votive offerings of paper money, dimly glowing jewellery, a bottle of
vintage champagne, an old wooden crucifix, a primitive-looking machete dull with age, and all arranged about the centrepiece: a human skull.

But amidst the sinister pictures, and arrayed like playing cards stood on end between the candles, he’d also looked upon photographs of people. Faces mostly, and captured in black and
white: sullen with hunger, famished and empty-eyed, the scruffy-headed dead on pillows of their own black blood, faded uniforms on clay, greying fabric collapsing on papery bodies, antique crime
photographs and holocaust panoramas, African genocides. Though which conflicts and atrocities they captured he couldn’t guess. The pictures could have been taken from any number of crises
over the last thirty years, and even intermingled with those from previous centuries.

The wall of the bar had also been dominated by a gaudy picture, transmitting a not-dissimilar message to that of the shrine. The painting was reminiscent of the art that illustrated garish
religious pamphlets, dispersed by the innumerable varieties of evangelists. In the painting there had been a great figure with an open maw, empty eye sockets, its flesh blemished and withered by
emaciation. The expression had been one of an unseemly joy, or a cruel excitement. The ragged thing was also crowned in wood, its form below the head comprised of dirty smoke as much as actual
cloth and limbs.

Tinged a bruised apricot like a sulphurous dawn, the skies behind the head of the tattered central figure had broiled with opal cumulous, edged black as if charred. A sickly jaundice had glowed
in the gaps between the clouds as if a heavy, nauseating, yellow light was struggling to come through from beyond. It had made the father think of water-borne diseases and cheap shrouds.

The cityscape the father didn’t recognize, but it was haloed in a ruddy orange to suggest fire. The painting had a ribbon of scarlet painted along the bottom. The text was French:
L’Homme devant la mort
. The father didn’t know any French.

He thought the painting medieval and European, yet primitively striking, while the shrine suggested the avant-garde with suggestions of the Americas. Another collision of decimating and
colluding cultures, old and new, indigenous and foreign, densely coded and alien to his eyes. Ignorance, superstition and distant eras of darkness, seeping back as the seas rose and forests
cindered. Of most concern was the incongruity of something so ugly, so malevolent, so brazenly despicable and yet perversely sophisticated, in a luxury villa occupied by a foreign criminal; a place
from which he may have been followed.
But by what?

He’d experienced a sense of an unaccountable awe too, after he’d knelt and executed the unconscious figure of Yonah Abergil; had even imagined himself making an offering, a
sacrifice, to initiate his participation in an arena he could barely guess at. Strangely euphoric, after the savagery he’d indulged in, he’d been enveloped in a curious atmosphere and
was momentarily reminded of the cathedral in Canterbury. He’d once attended a service there, to represent his company, around the time food aid stopped, when the great vaulted building had
filled with people to beg God to intercede in the lives of further millions threatened through starvation. The study in Yonah Abergil’s house had seemed to fill with the same hushed and
fearful respect that accompanied a silent candlelit procession he’d watched in London years before too; one that had stretched for miles in support of Bangladesh, each flame representing the
thousands of faces that had disappeared beneath the violent brown waters. The atmosphere distilled all that was inspired by the iconic picture of the two blonde orphans, the twins, shivering amidst
the wreckage of their home in Florida, benumbed but painfully innocent, their dead mother in the foreground, whom they had covered with a duvet as if she were only asleep, following a hurricane in
2027.

Inside that room, he had fallen into a mute and stunned reverence that had seemed to elevate into a sudden, unbearable comprehension of something else, vast and ineffable, that had reached away
beyond his mind and its vague notions of time and space. That was how it had seemed. A gripping fatalism for his species had finally chilled and clutched the room, then popped, as if a door had
opened to release a mounting pressure, moments after he had squeezed the trigger. The epiphany couldn’t have lasted for more than a few seconds.

He’d been left shaking, and wondering if the rumours about what these Kings of ruin believed had some merit.

Inside his dingy room at the guest house, the father slumped upon the bed and gulped at a bottle of rum. All about him were faded pink walls, orange curtains, china oddments rimmed with black
dust that still managed to hang from the dross-furred wall brackets; an antique ghost-installation of bank holiday weekends for poor couples in decades long gone. And he tried to process the
montage of bullet wounds, the faces inside Abergil’s house, the faces of the shrine, the sound of a presence shadowing his rout through the wet, black trees that played on repeat behind his
closed eyelids.

He drank more of the rum, and resumed his pacing of the dismal room as the storm slapped the side of the guest house. He knew . . . he
knew
now. If Yonah Abergil was to be believed,
then two years ago, for two hundred thousand pounds, paid by an affluent individual who must have been intensely aware of the father and his family, his daughter had been stolen to order by two
members of an organized multinational criminal gang: Oleg Chorny and Semyon Sabinovic. Those were the men who had driven the black car away from his home, up the street, to turn at the summit of
the road, and to take
her
away.

Oleg Chorny. Semyon Sabinovic. Oscar Hollow
.

He focused on the names. Scrabbled for his equipment. Activated the screen and inputted the details he’d tortured from Yonah Abergil’s corpulent mouth.

My God
, he’d executed a gang lieutenant in his own home. The enormity of the act, an assassination no less, suddenly became too large for his thoughts and he feared he’d
begun to hyperventilate.

But he found nothing, not a trace of any of the three names he had been given. There was no listing for any lawyer in the British Isles called Oscar Hollow. He clawed at his hair and began to
scream, wanted to go for a gun, but to do what? Then he stopped. Gene Hackman would know if they were on file, if they’d used an alias. All was not lost; Gene would know. The father had to
find out, or he’d just murdered another two people for nothing.

Yonah hadn’t been lying; the father trusted his instincts; they hadn’t let him down so far. In fact, they’d led him this far . . .
and no further?

What else had Yonah told him? The two kidnappers had addictions, were witches, shamans? Seers who had looked for, and seen,
something
unnatural. Men who were seekers. Seekers, but of
what? That’s what Yonah had communicated while in tremendous pain, fearing for his father’s life, and using broken English on the blood-smeared floor of his villa. Yonah had confirmed
that his daughter’s abduction had been no opportunist snatch and grab of a passing sex offender. It truly had been a professional job.

But for who?
Why would anyone go to such lengths, and use such diabolical personnel, to steal his four-year-old girl?

‘Oh God . . .’ The father cramped and curled into himself upon the bed, while his entire consciousness seemed to slip, or collapse, through a sluice, at the arrival of the most
unwelcome, but the most convincing, answer. Because such a price was paid only for a little girl that had looked a certain way and been a certain age. She was selected to satisfy the sadistic
tastes of a deranged and pathological individual, who had probably amassed his wealth by utilizing those very same traits.

At the end, was there a terror so great that your heart burst? Were there agonies inside your small and perfect body that I have clutched to my own chest, so many times, to calm your
distress? Did you encounter what no child ever should?

The father fell to his knees and scrabbled across the floor to his rucksack. He took out the four handguns, then stood up, gripping two of them, half-drunk and deranged; a witless, naked
scarecrow in a speckled mirror who wanted to run outside, back through the storm to the house of Yonah, where he could shoot dead anyone he found, by simple association with Abergil, and of what
his brokerage must have ultimately inflicted upon his daughter.

My love, my world
.

Maybe he should dedicate his last few days alive to executing, without warning, any man that bore any connection to King Death, any affiliate, associate, prospect, or sympathizer. Perhaps a
great levelling through bloodshed was needed to lance the corruption in the flesh of this beleaguered era.

And I could do it. Because if they hurt you, I could kill forever, and never feel a twitch of remorse
.

And beloved is the virus that will streak so hot and shivering through their numbers. Precious is the tumult of water and debris that sweeps them away and holds their rat faces beneath the
sewage and mud-thick swill. Sacred is the sun’s fire that chars them back to carbon
.

I will decimate them
.

If you no longer exist, then they will no longer exist
.

The father laid down his weapons and crawled to his bed, where he buried his face in the covers, and all but buried his daughter in an unknown grave, cold these two terrible years gone.

What had followed him home from the murder scene billowed wide and black through his sleep.

He came awake from a dream in which he’d opened the door of a cupboard inside some grey place, only to find a collection of weathered bones amidst soiled clothes. Children’s clothes
buried within an earthen cavity, dug through the floor.
We can show you what we found
. His mother-in-law had said this. But when he’d turned, weightless with shock, he’d seen
the body of Yonah’s girlfriend, stood tall in her black lingerie and high heels as she packed handguns and his daughter’s toys inside a leather suitcase. Her head was veiled, but he
sensed that another woman’s face smiled behind the black chiffon. The face of a woman he knew well when it pressed against the gauze. He’d shouted,
God, no!
But twisted within
sleep, and quickly passed through other strange, at times seemingly familiar, scenarios. He found himself in a room, a black place with horrors painted upon the walls. A painted corpse twisted and
danced in a distant corner, all the time grinning with satisfaction. The father then climbed and took his place within a shrine inside the room, amber-lit by candles in a cold darkness. Stepping
over bodies turned to wood and paper and barely held together by their disintegrating clothes, Yonah Abergil said,
And you, and you now
, directing his path at gunpoint, up through the
famine’s dead. Only for him to emerge in a concrete room, greened in the corners, with a cement floor stained dark and thickly. In there, he knelt beside his wife, the detective, and a woman
hooded inside a sack.

You did this. You!
Scarlett Johansson said through the bag over her face.

You did
, Gene Hackman agreed, quietly, nodding.

His wife spoke while crying.
The moment you meddled with that bitch, you did this to us all
.

Out of a dark doorway behind them came a figure carrying a machete.

No matter how much he thrashed, shouted and struck his face within sleep, he’d not been able to break from the disorderly bed he found himself in next, in a badly decorated room. An object
like a yacht’s mainsail smoked and yet cracked like wet cloth, where a ceiling should have been, over his naked body. The thing glistened at its heart, and from its internal oiliness the
vapours became as black and fine-haired as those of an insect under magnification.

Sleep’s insistent torments would not release him. He next dreamed of himself and his wife standing in water, thigh-deep, black and cold. They held their daughter’s little wrists as
she sank into the void. Something was entwined around her legs and waist that they could not see. Only her head and arms broke through the surface. They had the feeble strength he so often
encountered in persecution dreams; their arms were numb, near-lifeless, perhaps able to cling for a while, but not to raise a weight. In a voice of enforced calm, his wife had said, ‘We need
to say goodbye to her now.’ The idea caused the father the pain of being impaled upon an icicle. He looked down and into the small and frightened face and knew he would never let her go:
instead, he would go down to where she went, deep into the black.